A New Perspective on Community Governance of Forests in Bolivia:
Abstract: Most contemporary scholarship on decentralization assesses the impacts of these reforms by studying the decisions and activities of local government administrations: the targeted actors of the decentralization reforms. Meso-level analyses of this sort fail to capture an important determinant of aggregate governance performance: the institutional conditions for community self-governance. These conditions can only be observed by finer-scaled analysis of community organization.We argue that to come to come up with more nuanced explanations of the mixed governance outcomes of decentralized forest policy, scholars need to engage in multi-level analyses that include outcomes at sub-municipal levels. Our empirical analysis tests and discusses some of the conditions that are believed to be conducive to community self-governance of forests in Bolivia. In particular, we compare and contrast the effects of repeated interactions between local communities and a variety of external actors, including NGOs, local governments, regional as well as central government agencies on the likelihood of self-organization for forest governance. Controlling for the security of property rights as well as a range of documented determinants of effective self-governance, we find that of all the external actors that rural villages interact with it is the relatively frequency with which they interact with municipal government that has the most consistently positive effect on their efforts of self-governance.
